On Monday I joined friends to catch The Wind in the Willows Wiltonsat Wilton's Music Hall, chiefly to see Darrell Brockis as Toad; it's amazing what a really high-waisted pair of trousers can do to a man's shape. The weasels were sort of bankers now, as was the book's original author
Kenneth Grahame, who resigned as Secretary of the Bank of England in
1908 after either being nearly shot in the face during an anarchist
raid, or – depending on which motive you ascribe to the enforced retirement – accusing the Bank's future Governor of being "no gentleman", so I've no idea whose side he'd be on here.
(I have only my parents word for it that, many Christmases
ago, "Toad of Toad Hall" was the first show they ever took me to. It was the biggest room I'd ever been in. They tell me the sheer scale of the room made me whimper, then the lights lowered, and I didn't like that at all, and then old
man dressed as a mole stuck his head out of a trap door and shouted
"Hang white-washing!" and I howled and we left and that was it.)
Pleasingly concurrent with the fortunes of Toad Hall in this production were that of the baby otter puppet, Portly: It's always nice to see the inclusion of Pan, and "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" made a lot more sense as subplot here rather than just interlude. A lovely, lively, warm evening, and Wilton's Music Hall is an exciting space to explore during an interval. Do these photographs convey that?
I don't know. Badphone finally expired on Sunday, alas, but I appear to have found a
replacement with just as MySpace-era a camera, which was not my intention. I'll have to start hanging around more light.
On Tuesday I caught up for drinks with an old friend who told me that she can get married in Saint Paul's Cathedral, a thrilling possible future theatre project. I also found the following extraordinary performace on youtube while searching for video essays on "Brimstone and Treacle". I'd never made the connection before between Dennis Potter's fable of Satanic Home Invasion, and Mary Poppins (OR HAD I?)
I just wanted to write a good part for Olivia Colman.
And the TKA Smith Family Conservatory of the Art's family production of Poppins sheds little light on the banned seventies teleplay. But it does throw up a blisteringly confident turn from an uncredited singer in a role I don't remember as a rival nanny with a bun of grey hair fastened inexplicably to the top of her head, which the Conservatory has liked so much they've posted twice. In case you didn't manage to catch a Christmas show yourself this year I share both versions here, not for comparison, but to be played simultaneously to see if the resulting reason-shredding resonances open a portal to anywhere.
On Wednesday evening we performed the ante-penultimate Love Goddess at the Cockpit Theatre. The weather was milder now. The snow had gone. I didn't walk home directly. Badphone's replacement took what it could.
On Thursday, well, I wrote last Sunday's post, but I also learnt that that ante-penultimate show had actually been our penultimate as one of the cast had fallen ill, although testing negative for Covid. We'd planned our cast drinks for that evening however as some people had to rush off on Friday, including myself, who would have to be up early to catch a flight from Gatwick on a day of border control and train strikes. Our producer Laura had booked a table at a pub called the Pereseverance, and I hadn't left the flat all day.
As with the long walk home on Wednesday I found a refreshing solitude in that place. The barman gave me a Guiness in a weird glass, free nuts and sample of an unnamed Christmas cocktail he'd worked on. A lot was ending. Enjoying the uniterrupted ambience, it occured to me I could just try and go straight
to Gatwick after the final show though and not worry about sleeping Friday night.
I woke at midday, feeling finally Christmassy. The last night went ahead and everything felt new, which may not be unusual for a last night. As I said from the start, everyone's lovely, and while I may not have tried so much towards the end not to be too weird, it's only because that's what happens when you get to know people.
Then that stops, and there's no getting used to it. The show's over. Almog's on another continent now, and I took the Thameslink to Gatwick however many hours ago it was and found a nice, small copy of "Pinocchio" at the airport bookshop. Its tone is very Vic and Bob. In fact Bob Mortimer would make a brilliant Pinocchio. I woke on the plane surprised to see the land up at the top.
Mum met me at Montpellier just as I received the message that the cast member had now tested positive for covid after all, but that was okay because Susy's tested positive for Covid too. We made it down. That's the main thing. Dad showed us "Creature Comforts" in the cinema (because it's important to be reminded just how perfect Aardman can be...)
Tom put on the "Bottom" Christmas special. I'm about to put the presents out. I was meant to be cacting up on sleep but appear to haev written this instead. I hope you get everything you want this Christmas, ole unatendees.
Love Goddess - The Rita Hayworth Musical has another two weeks at the Cockpit, and I'm enjoying it more and more. Here's another lovely shot from Roswitha Chesher Also making me look good of course is the show's star and co-creator Almog Pail, who gave this fascinating interview in The Jewish Chronicle recently about one of the chief inspirations behind the show – as well as "one of Israel's founding fathers" – her own grandfather Meir Pa'il. During the second act I watch Almog sing the "Gilda"-inspired "I Don't Belong To You" from the theatre's gantry, in character as producer Harry Cohn. Just standing there, hoping to exude a kind of stony, middle-aged command, I realise is a quite familiar feeling to me: I've been playing these kind of characters since my late teens, and now I'm now genuinely middle-aged, yet can't be sure that I'm approaching this moment of onstage stillness any differently to how I might if I were still seveteen. I wonder if Orson Welles felt the same when he suddenly found himself the same age as characters he'd been playing for decades. They're not any easier to play now, but then they never seemed hard. They also never seemed nice. That's what's been going through my head when the lights are on me in the gantry. And when they're off I count the audience.
Top row, left to right: My brother-in-law Tom, Dan Tetsell, my sister Susy, my sister Alice, and my nephew Jake. A beautiful turnout.
"I was really the very first, I think, to sing naturally, to sing as you speak. And of course, it wasn't accepted by everybody. Certain clergy thought the songs I sang were evil, because of the love content and the way I sang them. And they really, really said, Rudy Vallée should not be allowed to sing on the air. Because – not of the content of the lyric particularly – but the hypnotic effect, the sexual quality, let us say. I was born, my friends sigh, with a tremendous amount, a great amount of sexual... emotion. Now, the song pluggers in 1940 in New York City called me 'The Guy With
the Cock in His Voice'. That was their expression: 'The Guy With the
Cock in His Voice'. That was evidently why, over a period of my
eighty-four years of life, I have known over a-hundred-and-forty-five
women and girls."
I have been doing a little research into the studio that made Citizen Kane. Also featured in Episode One of The RKO Story: Katharine Hepburn... King Kong... Murray Spivak's giant wind machines... a hundred dancing women strapped to aeroplanes... Ginger Rogers... and Fred Astaire, who also appears in Love Goddess - the Rudy Vallee Rita Hayworth Musical, tickets HERE!
Having skirted its making in my "research" for Love Goddess, today I decided to actually rewatch Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, which happily appears to be available on iplayer forever. The film seems timely now in a way it probably hadn't since it first came out. I initally wrote "frighteningly timely" but, if I'm honest, also quite pleasingly timely...
Timely not just in its depiction of one of the richest men in the world
maniacally throwing money away in an attempt to buy the love of "The People" and call it Democracy, but also in its depiction of the attempt to use money, and the media that money buys, to remake reality itself, and of the suicide-attempt-inducing nightmare of having to live inside that lie – the fate of Kane's second wife.
Susan Alexander's story probably stands up best as a metaphor; in reality, billionaires' wives seem to be managing okay. Still, as the opening of the film makes clear, Citizen Kane doesn't take place in reality. I was wildly wrong before when I said it began with a news reel. Of course, it begins with this:
In the ruins of the fairy tale that Kane retreated into, to the sound of the same sleepily growling horns composer Bernard Herrmann would later use to accompany Jason and the Argonauts disturbing Talos' gigantic jewellery box: lost monkeys, abandoned gondolas, an absurdly convex golf course, and the suggestion – confirmed in the film's closing shots – that this is just a taste of Xanadu... that you'll never be able to see the whole thing. Immediately, I was reminded of scrolling through my photos after a night walk, deciding what images to use, and how many, and what order to put them in on this blog. So actually, this opening does remind me of the real world. Or whatever you want to call what we're living in until the lights go out. That's what makes it the greatest.
Another two-show day, so here's your Sunday shot of Orson Welles.
I first saw "cold reading" demonstrated in Derren Brown's Séance, which is also well worth a watch. (Of course, Derren Brown being Derren Brown, I may only think I saw it demonstrated.) As described by Welles to David Frost below, it is "a fraudulent technique used by mediums in the Victorian times" whereby you "warm up the sucker" with facts about themselves that could apply to anyone – I have a scar on my knee! – until they're so convinced by your psychic powers, they start unwittingly volunteering infomation about themselves.
That's the theory. And Welles practised. According to various accounts – and a scene in Love Goddess (tickets available here) – he even practised on his future wife Rita Hayworth at their first meeting. It's never made explicit in our show that's what he's doing, but very little in our show is made explicit, which is one of the reasons I love it so much. And to Welles' credit – and unlike those who began it, or most famously practice it now – he only ever claimed to have "mind-reading capabilities", rather than the ability to speak to the dead. It was a more innocent time. There was a war on.
In 1953, over a decade before he would direct my Dad around a big white box in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a twenty-eight year old Peter Brook (looking justly proud, below right) was invited by New York based television host Alistair Cooke (below left) to direct a seventy-three minute long adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear for his show Omnibus, starring Orson Welles in perhaps his biggest ever nose.
My excitement at learning of this from the interview with Brook in the Welles documentary Magician was tempered only by my suspicion that, if the results of such an incredibly exciting collaboration had actually been any good, I would surely have heard of it before now. But – as with Welles' hour-long Hamlet – someone was good enough to put the whole thing on youtube, and I've now watched it, and it's definitely any good.
Here's the famous windmill scene.
King Lear doesn't actually have a windmill scene, but back in 1953 Peter Brook clearly hadn't yet been sold on the idea of theatre as an "Empty Space". Possibly influenced by his star, he decided to liven up the play's desolation with giant gears and shipwrecks. This looks unlike any Lear I've seen before, and that's always welcome.
Almost as interesting as the talent involved in this production is its timing. 1953 was the year Waiting For Godot had its world premiere, so Beckett's absurdist minimalism hadn't had a chance to influence interpretations yet, and this seems a very nineteenth-century apocalypse – broken rather than bare – with Welles providing a hearty, eye-rolling, utterly undiagnosable playing of Lear's madness to match it.
I pity the Fool.
"Orson suddenly took off with tremendous passion," Brook explains in Magician: "Television was the medium for great freedom, and experiment... Both of
us believed that you don't hang onto any idea, but the moment you've had
an idea, and you begin to try it, that leads you to think of something
else," which presumably is how we get to King Lear covered in seaweed and handing out starfish...
... which, by the way, I love! Lear "fantastically dressed in flowers", as per the stage directions, should look odd. Already then in his career Brook was adressing how to defamiliarise an audience to the canon, how to revitalise the oddness of its poetry. If this scene – one of my favourites in Shakespeare – is also a bit "one note" (and Welles seems to be doing more blind acting than Gloucester, who's actually meant to be blind) at least Lear-as-Oracle is not a note I'd heard played before.
Some of the production also looks stupid in a way that might not be intentional: here's a model shot of that windmill for example, and I can't tell if Lear's initial, pear-shaped, modernist clobber at the top of this blog is meant to be a nod to Ubu Roi...
... or just a very bold opening statement, in harmony with Welles seeing how fat he can make himself. It's not a look that lasts however. Lear's travelling clothes in Act Two are a lot more traditionally Tudor, and he wears them well. Has his nose gotten smaller? Or is that just distortion from however this was recorded (presumably pointing a film camera at a television screen)?
Perhaps the most Wellesian thing about this adaptation, as with his radio Hamlet that ditched Ophelia, are the massive cuts: a whole subplot, including the characters of Edmund and Edgar. Now if you don't know the play. you don't know what you're missing, but rewatching King Lear at the Globe earlier this year, surrounded my students, I was struck by just how much those two specific characters had attracted me to the play when I was thirteen. Despite Alistair Cooke refering to the subplot in his introduction as "the bane of every schooboy" for most teenagers, I suspect nasty brother Edmund's sexy-and-he-knows-it performative villainy, and nice brother Edgar's self-shunning, self-scarring, world-building self-abasement are the biggest revelations of any first encounter with the play. And the trouble is, if you lose them, what you're left with is quite hard to care about for quite a while...
Util the Fool comes in, and then it's anybody's guess. Centuries ago, productions of the play would cut the Fool completely, a creative decision heavily mocked in the twentieth century despite the huge number of twentieth-century productions that still seemed to have no idea what to do with him. The tenor of the times appeared to be to either make him a dirty old man – safe, but senseless, as Lear refers to him as "boy", and in many not necessarily wholesome ways the Fool is also a surrogate for Lear's youngest daughter – or have him played as fey, but not outrightly camp, so any jokes about "holding your peace" or having "nothing in the middle" fall absolutely flat while all the extras are instructed to laugh uproariously in that way that makes people hate Shakespeare forever. And for a while, this production does seem that.
But then the Fool climbs under a table and starts issuing heckles unseen, and that got my interest. And then Regan snogs her servant Oswald, and that really got my interest: In Edmund's absence it seemed this previously no-account jobsworth was now to be promoted to the role of suave ladykiller and commander of an army, despite losing a fight to a middle-aged Kent in Act Two. In better news, although we lose Edgar, this production keeps his alter-ego "Poor Tom", played here by the artist who introduced a teenage Welles first-hand to Expressionism and the Theatre of Cruelty at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, and who would later be the Iago to his Othello: Micheál MacLiammoir...
Poor Tom is actually served very well by being presented as a character in his own right: this production isn't scared to spend its precious running time dwelling
on the rich backstory and personal mythology that Edgar for some reason made up for him, and one can enjoy lines like "Nero is an angler in the lake
of darkness" coming out of nowhere, without having to worry about Edgar's "process" behind such startling invention. It's also great to see Welles' Lear in awe of a wretch played by Welles' mentor.
Another nice piece of staging I'd never seen before: the show's final scene takes place in Lear's throne room, the same space as the opening scene. Well played then, everyone, considering. Sure, Welles doesn't always remember his lines, and his moustache blows off in the storm scene, but that's what happens if you use real wind. Enjoy...
Today we had two performances of Love Goddess, I didn't trip up once, and that requires a bit of upper body strength, so
I'm afraid I'm now a little too tired to do anything more than just
fob you dear unatendees off with some more Orson Welles content. Here are a couple of stills from Magician: The Astonishing Life and Work of Orson Welles, directed by Chuck Workman (do you think he's American?) I saw it last night and I'd like to think that, for all the ways I don't look like him, Welles would have killed for a big old nose like mine.
One of the joys of Magician, for me at least, is the number of clips I now recognise from my own youtube research, as previously posted on this blog, and the wealth of guests Workman presents to provide commentary on this material is also breathtaking: not only Simon Callow and Peter Bogdanovich, not only Richard Linklater, Julie Taymor, Spielberg, Lucas and Scorsese, not only Welles' last "companion" Oja Kodar spilling tea gloriously from the Vila Welles on the Dalmation Coast – although I'm pretty sure that, in a rare slip-up from Workman, this...
... is actually a picture of Vincent D'Onofrio – but even one of Orson's own former classmates (not a fan) and perhaps most surprisingly of all, again at least to me, Peter Brook, who also appears at the end of this trailer. I spent some of my time off today researching Brook's
collaboration with Welles further, but I'll probably present that tomorrow. And I thought it more sporting to embed the trailer than the whole documentary, but you can watch that here.
The problem with trying to write a post a day while simultaneously performing in Love Goddess is not that there's a risk I'll run short of material, but that I'll never write about anything else. Here's yet more Orson Welles.
Welles by Welles
In 1955 the BBC invited Welles to record six fifteen-minute-long, occassionally illustrated, improvised monologues on the subject of his life thus far. These he used to – as he himself put it in episode two – weave theatrical legends, meaning a lot of "Orson Welles' Sketchbook" consists of anecdotes, and a lot of those anecdotes are pretty apocryphal, if not completely made up on the spot, and that's a tremendous shame really because the work discussed is so interesting in its own right. I'd love, for example, to hear Welles' account of the work that went into making his directorial debut in Harlem, but I've next to no interest in a tacky anecdote about a supposedly imported coven of witch doctors making cursed, goat-skin drums.
Or, as in episode above, I'd love to hear him discuss the influence his hoax-news radio adaptation of "War of the Worlds" might have had on both the entire broadcast medium and his own later work ("Citizen Kane" famously opens with a fake news reel) but I'm less interested in the influence it might have had on John Barrymore's dogs... Welles would be so much more interesting if he didn't try so hard to be interesting, and the genuine achievement of "The Martian Broadcast" has been completely overshadowed by the legend of a country sent mad spun around it. Am I being a snob? He probably understood his audience better than I do.
And yet, even as he makes this shit up, Welles relates how "fed up" his company had been with the credulity of listeners to "this new magic box... So in a way our broadcast was an assault on the credibility of the machine... We wanted people to understand that they shouldn't swallow everything that came from the tap."
Enormous thanks to tried and trusted unatendees A sea lion in a hat and RedScharlach for generously attending the matinee of Love Goddess today. I don't want you to think from their kind words that we do a total hatchet job on Welles, but this is Rita Hayworth's story, and he was "a man of the world", and to quote London Hughes: "Play silly games, win silly prizes."
Tech week continues into the actual Press Night tomorrow. We'll do two shows tomorrow, and we did two today, but with every show I feel less and less like John Daker, so COME! (John Daker is the man in this clip. It is a hard clip to search for if you don't know that, so thanks to my sister Susy for knowing what I was talking about.)
First there was the tape, endlessly copied and passed around. Dad owned one he'd play for friends who came over: waiting for the good bits, they'd sit and listen to a seemingly drunk and spiralling Orson Welles record with a telling mixtue of misplaced care and angry disdain voice-overs for Findus in 1970. The internet had yet to be invented but this recording had already become a meme...
John Candy quotes the tape here: "Yes. Always." (originally a response to a director's "I'm sorry.") This was what you impersonated if you wanted to impersonate Orson Welles in 1982, and it would come to define the final act of his life. A deeply unfair definition, but Welles sort of only has himself to
blame for this because it's too good a scene to cut from any biography. The wikipedia entry for "Frozen Peas" – yes, it has a wikipedia entry – suggests Welles tried to wrest control over the Findus narrative with an anecdote about a wild goose chase he claims to have led the "fellas" on around Euope. He had also once claimed on the "Dean Martin Show" that even Shakespeare had done commercials...
But these outtakes weren't recorded in a hotel in Venice or Vienna. You can tell he's watching a screen, so if the anecdote was true, he clearly came back for more. I think Dr Moon Rat's reconstruction is probably more accurate. Or Pinky and the Brain's, a children's cartoon made twenty-five years after the original session, and ten years after Welles' death. But again, before the internet. Maurice LaMarche had clearly also heard the tape...
"I am sitting here now with a bag of boiling water on my heart"
So the twenty-one-year-old Orson Welles cut Ophelia almost entirely from his hour-long Hamlet it turns out, only introducing her ten minutes from the end to drown her so that he could do the grave-digger scene. That's quite a cut. Let's put a pin in that then, and rejoin the Womens' Revolution in Iran. Among the death sentences and other horrors of state retaliation following the death in custody of Mahsa Ahmini after her arrest for inappropriate headwear, there are also sanitary pads being put up to blind security cameras now. Instagram's translation of Sareh Ghomi's brilliant post above provides both illumination and a poetry of its own, but take any gendered pronouns with a pinch of salt because I think Farsi only has the one. Thanks to my friend Faren for sharing this:
"This is the women's
revolution, I mean this picture, I am sitting right now with a bag of
boiling water on my heart and rolling in pain to myself and thinking why
I shouldn't have seen this one piece all these years, special black
bags that when you said: a pack of purple blinks, please! The local
superintendent wouldn’t hand you in that thick, smelly black bag. I
mean, during her pregnancy, the path of the drawer from the room to the
bathroom had to be put like a bartender in your pocket or pull your
pants and shirt over it so that the male elements of the family and
friends would not see it and get upset! I mean my friend who never threw
his used tape in the trash bin at his workplace and took it with him to
an urban trash bin because he thought the environment was too
masculine! That day when your boyfriend, after a big party, wants to
clean the toilet, but his laziness in putting the bag in the bucket and
sticking one of the same used ones to the bottom of the bucket, makes
him face a scene he had never seen before and sound Don't forget to
throw it up! They don't know what winged means! They don't know what to
buy when you're in trouble and slamming the door and wall! Or even
ashamed to buy and load a super so that the important package is not
visible, sometimes out of kindness buy diapers like because you're in so
much pain. Sanitary tape is a white fragrant piece that prevents the
bleeding from spreading, and right here in this picture, it's glued
itself to the wagon camera to stop the bleeding so it doesn't get lost!
So the female body and all that's connected with it is changing user,
it's taking over, it's breaking all taboos, see this white piece stuck
to the camera and remember to be safe you are safe too. #women_life_freedom"
Love Goddess, the musical in which I play – among other
husbands of Rita Hayworth – Orson Welles, opens this Friday, and you can
get tickets here. We're deep into tech week, so I don't have much time to blog, and I haven't even listened yet to what I'm posting today, but I'm looking forward to it.
Archie, Jane, me, Imogen, and Joey. I believe it's called proof of sweat.
You'd have thought that, of all the big Shakespearean roles which the
erudite, intellectual, procrastinatingly impatient, fatally
disappointed, theatre-obsessed Welles had tackled, Hamlet would among them, and it turns out you'd be right. The only reason I didn't know this until I looked it up today, is that it was back in 1936 when Welles was still twenty-one, in a self-directed radio adaptation. Of course, he'd already staged Macbeth by then. My parents sent me the first volume of Simon Callow's massive biography "The Road To Xanadu" for my birthday, so I'll see what that has to say about it...
Oh. Okay. So much for my interpretation then – of either Welles or Hamlet, take your pick. But no! Both feared they might be phonies, both feared their own monstrousness while also wishing they were more like the monsters, and there's not a single speech of Hamlet's I can't imagine in Welles' voice, so maybe it's Callow who's wrong. But he did write a massive biography. But he says it was a thirty-minute adaptation, and it's actually two thirty-minute adaptions. But they didn't have the internet back in 1995. But we do.
UPDATE: Okay, I've listened to it. I think it's fair to say there is one quite heavy omission. Can you guess what got cut?
"I was eternally grateful to Harry Cohn for what he did for me, because I had a musical, Around The World In Eighty Days, and I had to open in Boston, I had a lot of costumes waiting in the railway station, which couldn't go from the railway station to the theatre about eight blocks away unless someone paid Brookes Costume Company forty-seven thousand dollars..."
Hm. Transcribing even this almost definitely exaggerated anecdote from Orson Welles, it strikes me how meandering and ultimately inconsequential the story behind the making of The Lady From Shanghai is, especially given it was Welles' one onscreen collaboration with both his wife Rita Hayworth, and her longtime harasser, producer Harry Cohn.
But that's fine, I guess. It's called Show Business, not Show Interesting. Let's finish...
"I found myself in the box office trying to think of who could send me this money, and I thought: Harry Cohn. I hardly knew him. And I called him up on the long distance phone. I said 'Harry Cohn, this is Orson Welles. I've just read a book –' and I turned a paperback around which the girl had in front of her who was selling tickets and I said 'It's called...' something or other, it wasn't called Lady From Shanghai then – I said: 'Buy it, and I will make it for you if you send me forty-seven thousand dollars in two hours.' And he did."
So I guess Around The World In Eighty Days did happen. Actually this is the internet, isn't it, I can check... Okay that's interesting, there's a contemporary recording on youtube (brought to you by "splendind, splendid Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer even in this time of grain restriction") that sounds like Americans doing The Goon Show, which I don't think I like. The video description suggests the show inspired the pretentious flop in Fred Astaire's musical The Band Wagon. Astaire worked a lot with Hayworth...
Anyway, ultimately Welles blamed composer Cole Porter for the failure of Around The World In Eighty Days, and film historians blamed Cohn for the failure of the The Lady From Shanghai, as they blame nearly every one of Welles' producers for the messy, unfinished nature of nearly every one of Welles' films. I don't know who they blame for the messy, unfinished nature of Welles' marriage to Hayworth or his political career, but don't get me wrong, I love Welles probably as much as he'd want me to: I love Citizen Kane unreservedly, I love The Trial unreservedly, and I love F for Fake unreservedly, and that's it, but that's more than enough. Joe Dante below also blames Cohn, and he'll know more than I do. He also mentions in his retelling the surprising involvement of William "The Tingler" Castle. But be warned: Rita Hayworth gets slapped in the face in the trailer's closing seconds. And be reminded: I'm playing both Welles and Cohn in the musical The Love Goddess at the Cockpit in a few weeks. Tickets HERE!
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